Winchester College Publication Winchester College Classic Talks | Page 5

apparently interviewed the candidates for the chair of History. That really
must have been terrifying. She also insisted that the chair should be filled
immediately, even though the Oxford faculty wanted to freeze it for a year for
financial reasons. There is no indication that the government offered to make
good the shortfall, and so in a way the affair of 1541 and the untransferred
lands was re-enacted. Admittedly, by then the government was providing the
university with quite a lot of other funds, and might have felt that it was
doing its bit.
Two last questions before we turn to the professors themselves: why 1541,
and why Greek and not Latin? It was what was being done all over Europe,
part of a genuine Humanist renaissance of ideas. France, for instance, had
appointed two lecteurs royaux in Greek and two in Hebrew in 1531 – again
not putting Latin in the first shop window; admittedly, Latin there only had
to wait three more years, whereas the Latin chairs in both Oxford and
Cambridge were not endowed until the nineteenth century (1854 and 1869
respectively). It is tempting to think that Latin had to wait because it was
less threatened, being a good deal more of a genuine European lingua franca
than Greek. Boys at Winchester in the early sixteenth century could be beaten
if they were found speaking English rather than Latin, whereas Greek was
much rarer. It tells a tale that the sixteenth-century statutes of both St Paul’s
and Merchant Taylors’ stipulate that a headmaster should have Greek as well
as Latin ‘if such may be gotten’: it does not sound as if it could be taken for
granted. There may be something in this, but the more salient explanation
is likely to be the link with Christian texts, both the New Testament and the
early fathers. Nearly all the early Regius professors duly worked on patristic
texts, and several who had held the chair formed part of the team producing
the King James Bible in 1611. The same was true of Hebrew, another of
Henry’s Regial foundations: that was taken as biblical Hebrew, though more
recent holders have spread their interests more widely. In fact, all five of those
initial Regius chairs can be seen as more closely connected with one another
than one might think. Ecclesiastical law was one of the three areas designated
for the Professor of Civil Law, while medicine was still very much a matter
of going back to the Greek texts, especially the Hippocratic Corpus and
Galen. Several of the early professors of Greek were in fact more respected for
their contribution to medicine than to Greek, though it is less clear that
anything they wrote could have made anyone well.
That was true of the first professor, the Wykehamist John Harpsfield; he also
set the tone in a further way, being the first to be sent to gaol. He was a strong
Catholic, which makes his appointment by Henry more remarkable, and he
came into his own under Mary, when he was extremely vigorous in the
persecution of Protestants. A print survives of his cross-examination of
Thomas Cranmer in St Mary’s Church, Oxford (Figure 6). It was his faith
that led to his imprisonment in Fleet Prison, for on Elizabeth’s accession he
refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy; he was not released until 1574.
Figure 6 Thomas Cranmer answers the charges put to him by John Harpsfield
So the early professors were clerics, and it was a young person’s post, limited
originally to three years at a time. They then went off to country parishes. The tos and fros of religion under Mary and Elizabeth had their impact on
the chair as well, as the next two professors were both thrown out and both
in turn reinstated, so that those two – George Etheridge and Giles Lawrence
– had four tenures between them. The professors were required to lecture
five times a week from 8 to 9 a.m. on Homer, Demosthenes, Isocrates,
Euripides, ‘or another’: five lectures was clearly soon felt to be over-arduous,
and the schedule was reduced to four in 1564/5. Some light on what
‘lecturing’ meant becomes clearer when we come to the first figure of real
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